The Recycling Scavenger
Are we doing ‘Recycling’ right?
We recently moved houses and one of our purchases was a lovely new floor lamp for the lounge (a slightly expensive one I should add). Now… I tend to be the impatient type and the one to do things at high speed – which means unwrapping new items, assembling and getting rid of any packaging as soon as possible. This means that sometimes, things go wrong — even with my more sensible other half always reminding me to ‘check the packaging incase there’s anything we’ve forgotten to take out’.
On this occasion it resulted in me mistakenly ‘recycling’ a couple of hundred quids worth of brand new glass ‘orbs’ that were meant to be the light bulb covers on our new fancy floor lamp…oops.
Luckily I realised my error somewhere between my salt and vinegar crisps (‘chips’ for the Americans) and my dark chocolate kitkat — which I hasten to add got left by the wayside as my wife and I rushed into the car over to the local Sainsbury’s (supermarket) to rummage through the recycling bin and see if we could salvage the fancy lamp glass orbs.
Luckily for us the recycling bins had just been emptied out the day before and it being a Monday not many people had visited since our trip … I could see the four polystyrene blocks that had the orbs within them sitting at the bottom of the bin and all I had to do was fish em out (as the Sainsbury’s staff advised that they had no keys for the bins and that they would be emptied next at the weekend..) and hope that what’s inside had remained in tack. And so… armed with a stick (salvaged from another recycling container)…so began the most bizarre version of the game ‘go fish’ I’ve ever played.
“Are you okay, Sir?”… I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s always a guy hanging around these recycling centres keen to rummage through other people’s stuff for any left behind valuables. It seemed, unwittingly, I was on this guys ‘patch’ and I was politely yet inquiringly being asked if I needed any help. ‘You’ll need a longer stick’…after getting a lot of chocolate on my hands — don’t ask me where it came from — the ‘recycling scavenger guy’ and my wife both thought it was a more notorious type of brown gloopy substance and gasped in shock, horror and awe at me taking a good sniff of it — I managed to fish out and recover the glass orbs…which were all miraculously still in tack.
This got me thinking… how has the whole moving home process resulted in SO MUCH *insert expletive* recycling. To the extent that I simply assumed four huge blocks of polystyrene were part of the unnecessarily over protective packaging for the new floor lamp and didn’t contain anything of value. The truth is I’m all packaged out.
Companies— including Amazon, despite all the fancy computers and algorithms, haven’t got box sizes or packaging right. There’s always a ridiculous sized box with rolls and rolls of those plastic air bag things (which by the way — popping these can be the source of many a minutes of childish enjoyment) or too much brown paper.
As we move into this post pandemic world is our recycling system ready to cope with huge increases in household recycling from increased online orders? Are we even good enough at recycling our existing stuff in the first place? Why is it necessary for businesses to have to produce so much packaging?
The jury’s still out as to whether we are collectively moving in the right direction in responding to these questions. Whilst the recycling industry is a dynamic and growing industry consumers still struggle with the lack of information and education around what can be recycled and what goes to the landfill.
Labelling on products still aren’t clear enough for consumers to understand (apparently in the UK we find it most difficult to tell if light bulbs and crisp (aka chip) packets are recyclable or not). And even when we do understand the labelling, the myriad of recycling sorting boxes befuddles the bejesus out of all of us. And so…our discipline in adhering to the colour coding systems is abysmal and means all recycling is kind of re-sorted at the plant anyway (so why do we even bother?!). It makes sense therefore that we move toward a future state where the need to recycle anything at all is ‘designed out’ of the products and packaging we buy and consume.
But there is no overnight solution to better recycling and waste management. Whilst the use of eco-friendly packaging is definitely on the rise and continues to grow in appeal the brands that implement this approach are still seen as expensive and bought by only those who can afford it (i.e. the minority of our populus). We’re still some way behind Japan, Germany and South Korea who have some of the highest recycling rates, Globally. The UK still has to export almost two thirds of it plastics to other countries to deal with…out of sight and out of mind – not our problem anymore!
Should businesses and corporations be primarily responsible for the amount of recycling and waste we produce? And, how do councils, individuals and government work together to ensure we do the right thing to minimise our impact on the environment?
Having had my arms deep into a recycling bin and half my head stuck through the flap to see what’s at the bottom …my commitment at least to myself is to make sure I change my own habits of consumption to focus on reducing the amount of recycling – not just waste – that I produce, by making a more conscious effort to really think about the impact I am having on the environment when making a purchase.
This experience and post has raised more questions than answers for me. I think ultimately it comes down to what we can change about ourselves and our lifestyles to have a more positive impact on the environment.
Understanding and being more conscious about what and why we buy what we buy and consume what we consume, and the impact this has on the world we live in, is an important first step in figuring out what we can change to move towards a world where zero waste is the new norm and recycling (if and when required) is ‘done well and done right’.
